Amanda Gray's Photos

Ise: Tourist Shopping Arcade. The adorable giant cat statute draws money in.

Ise: There were rocks. There were trees. It rained.

Just Jingu. The shrine at Ise is the first shrine. (This is Shinto, by the way, not to be consued with budhism, which has temples.)

But in addition to the shrine, there are a number of lesser shrines at Ise. Like this one by the river, for a dragon god...

A couple days after visiting Ise, Erik and I journeyed -- no, trekked -- to OSugiDani, Big Cedar Valley. First we took a normal train, then a local train, then an old diesel train that chugged up a very steep hill; then a rickety old bus that dropped us off on the far side of the village where we walked down to the river and clambered onto a rickety old boat that took us up the river...

... then we started hiking, up, up, up, and across quite a number of very nice suspension bridges like this one. There were signs everywhere warning us that we could die here.

After a while, we found a couple places where the trail had been overcome by rock falls, and others where the trail was an old rock fall that someone had very thoughtfully pounded chains into the larger rockfaces to serve as something to hold onto while you dragged yourself up. Or to hold onto while you walked on a ledge underneath a waterfall. Slippery, cold, incredibly awesome.

Unfortunately, I'm not in this picture, or you'd see how very big these rocks are. The trail is in there somewhere.

Falls like these are what made the hike worthwhile. The views really were breathtaking; the water was freezing cold and crystal clear.

I don't have any pictures of the lodge we stayed in that night -- it was perched halfway up the trail, and we got there just as the light was failing. I have never been happier for a hot bath and a pallet on the floor than I was that night.

There were more falls the next day.

This is Erik, who was teaching english in Japan when I visited. In this picture we are very near the top -- look at the stairs! Suddenly the trail got very, very tame.

This is me, at the top of OSugiDani. There's a big lookout built on the top of the mountain; unfortunately it was fairly socked in, otherwise we just might have been able to see FujiSan.

For two days we hardly saw anyone on the trail; just a couple hikers coming down the hill. When we got to the top, there were tons of people -- turns out there are busses you can take that go straight to the top, where there are restaurants and souvenier shops and a nice stepped path to the summit.